[OSSR]Monte Cook's World of Darkness

[Ancient History]

OSSR: Monte Cook's World of Darkness
A World of Darkness Game for Revised 3.5 Edition Rules


Well, yes. But I was think of something a little more...


There we go.

FrankT:

Technically, Monte Cook's World of Darkness came out in 2007, which makes it dubiously acceptable as an OSSR in 2015. But it's an unholy mashup of World of Darkness and WotC's Open Gaming License. And both of those things come from the Clinton Administration. And if you're reading this in the future, I mean the first Clinton administration. So we'll say one way or the other that it counts.

Let's get this out of the way: Monte Cook's World of Darkness is something no one asked for and which was nothing more than a blatant cash grab. Monte Cook did not care about this product in any way, important sections are farmed out to fucking Sean K. Reynolds of all people, and it was just a pile of text filled in until it was full and then shat out the door for money. There are three writers (Monte Cook, SKR, and Luke Johnson), the Creative Director is Rich “The Onyx Path” Thomas, and it's edited by Scribendi.com. Yes, for reals. It's edited by a website,This book is 280,000 words of shovelware text filling up 380 pages and retailing for fifty bucks. I would be pretty surprised if more than about 20,000 words got written that didn't make it into the final product. Three people got their marching orders and pretty much just arrglebarrgled text into boxes until it was full. That's a hundred thousand words each for distinguished hacks who have access to word processors, primary writing on this was probably done in a month and a half. And then editing was done by an actual website, so this entire fucking thing was probably turned around in less than a season. Inspiration to presentation for this whole fucking thing: three months. Tops.

The only portion of this book that has an actual list of contributors you couldn't write on your tongue is the interior art. There are thirteen credited interior artists. There is, admittedly, a lot of art in this book. It all looks kind of like the sort of generic World of Darkness art that nWoD books had in them. I honestly can't tell if these were reprints from other White Wolf books or material first printed in this book. Either way it represents Rich Thomas doing the thing he is still doing – keeping a bunch of fanboys around who crank out urban gothic art on their spare time and then paying them chicken feed to fill his books with it.

What this boils down to is two things. The first is that by reading and reviewing this book, AncientHistory and I will be putting more thought into this book than anyone in the history of the world has ever done, including the people who made it. And the second is that the position that Onyx Path is in to do good for the gaming world is incredible, and the fact that “they” (by which I mean “Richard Thomas”) have not and will not be doing any is really sad. Richard Thomas is sitting upon an engine that generates all the art and typesetting and funding streams you'd need to make a game book. Any game book. Any premise. Any ruleset. If he wanted to put together good games, all he'd need to do is get some writing and development. But he never did that, and he's never going to do that because he is a cancer in this industry.

Richard Thomas.

AncientH:

It's arguably worse than that. In GURPS: Vampire: The Masquerade I discussed how that book represented the good of both systems - GURPS for having semi-passable mechanics and at least a bare minimum effort to make the setting consistent, attractive, and playable, and V:tM having a bare-bones concept with enough legs and attractive artwork to draw in the kids that think vampires are cool.

Whatever else your opinions on the games are, you have to admit that D&D 3.5 was a highly visible and influential game system, and the new World of Darkness was a highly stylized and prominent game setting. The fact that d20 lacks an actual setting by design and that nWoD's system is mostly the flaming turd in the paper bag on the doorstep of life, this mashup at least had potential. This could have been the Coloning of a new generation, where even though both setting and system were flawed, they combined to make something more palatable than either. Or at least more capable of passing for a playable RPG than nWoD on its own.

This was not to be.

More importantly, I don't know why. This didn't happen sooner, and in a better format. I know Monte Cook & co. don't give a tenth of a sizable shit for the World of Darkness, but by this point White Wolf had a fairly sizable stable of d20 books through their Sword & Sorcery imprint, Cook's own Malhavoc Press, licensed titles like Ravenloft d20, Everquest, Scarred Lands...my point is they had d20 procedural content generation down pat. They had nWoD shovelware generation down pat. There is really no excuse why they went together like the world's most disgusting cocktail.

FrankT:

This book has 10 chapters, 2 Appendices, an Introduction, and three fiction pieces. That's sorta kinda like having 16 chapters but also really importantly not at all like that in a lot of ways. A page full of text in this book (of which there are of course many) has just shy of a thousand words on it (page 146, for example, has 998 words). This means that the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is very nearly exactly true for this book. But it also underlines how much of this book is filler space. There are 280,000 words in this fucking book and 380 pages. That means when you add up all the scribbles, overlarge headings, pictures and just plain hanging white space, that's close to a hundred pages. Big pages, in a hardbound coffee table book that cost fifty dollars.



Anyway, we're going to try to blaze through as many chapters in a single post as we can. Because dag nabbit we have no intention of doing this up in 16 or more posts.

AncientH:

We really don't.

The decision not to have a general setting for D&D 3.+ - yes, I know it has some basic hangers-on from Greyhawk, but let's be honest here - is tied in to both the history of the game and the hard marketing: D&D is primarily a system you use to run your own games at home. And those games are not all going to look alike. Which is fine. As much as we may bitch, that's the main difference between D&D and World of Warcraft: rules and setting are applied (and sometimes created) at the table; it's a collaborative storytelling effort where your characters are largely limited by your imagination rather than the set limits of a computer, and where the setting can be anything you can describe, not limited to a script and how hot your graphic card is.


Game on.

Which is part of the reason why, from a design perspective, the modular nature of d20 makes sense. It is easy to generate rules content for D&D because it is easily broken down into chunks: classes, skills, feats, spells, equipment, monsters, magic items. The format is already there, there are examples a-plenty. The only hard part is working them into your game... it's the interface, largely, where D20 falls down, more than any internal flaws regarding skill checks or dubious magic systems (okay, linear warriors/quadratic wizards is a thing, but that's part of the interface too). Like GURPS, d20 struggles with trying to boil basically incompatible ideas down to the same mechanics and format them so they talk to each other - and that means that any one individual piece of bad design in the game is going to potentially impact every aspect of the design. It's not just "there are no Snorkles in Eberron!", it's "How the fuck do the Snorkle bubble-powers interact with the Soap-Golems of Zigaro?"

On the other hand, WotC made a shitload of money on the idea that they could sell both rule books and setting books without having to dick with the problem as to whether or not the two ever actually worked together.

FrankT:

I would be a total hypocrite with chocolate sprinkles if I said that a bottom up redesign of World of Darkness with a tighter core system was a bad idea. I mean fuck, I wrote After Sundown. World of Darkness is sclerotic, but appealing. The fluff is full of bad ideas clinging on like barnacles to the hull of a ship of fools. Every edition of the rules has been notably bad, even by the extremely generous standards of role playing games of the 90s. And yet... World of Darkness is basically Teen Wolf, Underworld, and Vampire Diaries. It's thematically awesome. The thirty second pitch is pure gold. The one hour pilot is totally awesome. It's just the details that need to be rethought.

World of Darkness needs a reboot. And it deserves a reboot. The problem here is that the “Creative Director” for this project is the same jerk who is in charge of the IP now. And basically that means that the guy running the reboot of the brand is the same person who was already hurling the brand off a cliff with his offensively failtastic creative direction.

That, and while I think most people would agree that 3rd edition D&D is a much tighter system than any version of Storyteller/Storytelling, it's not a good fit for modern games. The D20 system is actually pretty good at what it does, but what it does simply does not include stories in which you expect major characters to be killed if they are shot by the police. No one has ever figured out a way to do guns in D&D that wasn't shit, because the whole narrative of guns is a square peg to D&D's iron age heroism.


This game sucks because the mechanics don't port well to the genre.

So when this book came out, pretty much everyone saw it for the blatant cashgrab that it was. Some people probably couldn't articulate why it was so obviously a ridiculous charade, but their instincts still told them what it was. I've never heard of anyone actually playing this fucking thing, and no expansion material was ever written. Even Monte Cook never did anything with this thing.

AncientH:

Thank you Dark Gods for small favors; I really don't want to see fucking Pathfinder World of Darkness where you bitch about how your Brujah Monk/Fighter is feeling small in the pants because of the Tremere.

Following the standard internet meme, from henceforth I shall be referring to this book as "McWoD."



Intro Fiction:
More Complicated Now

FrankT:

We're doing into fiction? Sure, it has a name, why the hell not?

Short and pretentious fiction pieces are easy to write. They use up wordcount and don't have to be rectified with shit. Back when I was making Shadowrun materials, I would submit like 3 or 4 different flash fiction chapter openers per chapter I was working on and then just ask the devs to choose which one they thought worked the best. Because you can shit these out super fast. And if you're being paid by the word, that's music to your ears. So it's no surprise that RPG writers and lazy devs have been reluctant to get rid of these things.

White Wolf had a particularly annoying method of doing these pieces of intro fiction, and mostly of the shitty hit parade are in full form. You have the story open up before the title page or table of contents and. You have white on black text, weird fonts, and creative use of curved text justifications. In short, it really looks like the typesetter was just playing with all the Adobe InDesign protocols that they are not normally allowed to use because they make things “hard to read.” To the extant that this story has saving graces, it is that it is short – just five pages and with all the bullshit filler doodles, you could squeeze it down to three.

AncientH:

I, on the other hand, really enjoyed intro fiction as a creative exercise to get the most content into 500 words. Not that anyone much seemed to fucking notice, but that's the thing: I took freelancing and the fluff very seriously.

This intro fiction for McWoD is particularly annoying, because it's written like an InQuest advertisement aimed at the mentally retarded subset of Jihad players that always felt the need to be dark and edgy, but never quite got beyond not being able to buy that Godsmack album at Walmart because they were afraid to go to checkout with something that had a parental warning label on it.



It's also amazingly generic. Stunningly so. There isn't a single piece of data in this whole piece that can tie it to anything related to the product identity of World of Darkness, whatsoever. It's basically four pages of back cover copy.

FrankT:

The intro fiction More Complicated Now does not appear to be about the World of Darkness. The POV character appears to be a vampire, but he appears to be a Buffyverse vampire, where there is a sharp divide of self between the monster and the person, and they can talk to each other. And souls getting trips to Hell are part of the deal. The “vampires” appear to be like the body possessing demon ghosts from Unknown Armies. Which is a reasonable thing for vampires to be in a story, but it doesn't seem remotely connected to The World of Darkness. Right away, this book doesn't seem like a love letter to the World of Darkness by a game designer and fan, so much as some mercenary write-for-pay by someone who couldn't be fucked to read any of the source material at all. This isn't so much Ultimate Spider Man as Ultimatum. Ugh.



The main character is unlikeable. Not “tragic” or an “anti-hero” or something, he's just a friendless asshole who murders people with a body he possessed or something. The end is that the body regains partial control and they are a hybrid entity, but the reader is given absolutely nothing and no reason to empathize with either portion of the Firestorm Matrix vampire. I can kinda see why you might think these flavors of vampire were a good idea, but they sure as fuck aren't protagonist material.

AncientH:

Roll credits page (where we are one comma away from Monte Cook being a trademark of White Wolf, which I personally would have found hilarious and appropriate) and the Table of Contents, which appears to have been generated automatically from the headers. Like ya do these days.

Second Chapter Zero
Introduction

FrankT:

The introduction is 3 pages long, and begins with a personal story by Monte Cook about how he really liked Vampires and was completely cut off from Goth culture.

While this was before the vampire and goth subcultures really existed, among some of my friends, I was known as the “vampire guy.”

OK, he's talking about 1991. Anne Rice's Interview With The Vampire came out in 1976 and The Cure's Pornography came out in 1982. When Vampire: The Masquerade came out, it wasn't an early adopter of the Goth subculture, it was a blatant cashing in on a decade and a half old subculture having matured and acquired spending money of its own. But while Monte Cook is just dead factually wrong about how all this shook out, I do believe that this is how he experienced it. He grew up in Watertown, South Dakota and in 1991 he was 23 years old and had been working as a game writer for 3 years. I totally believe him that he had no idea that Goth subculture was a thing that existed before he found it at a gaming convention.

What's weird is the whole epistemic closure of it all. Vampire: The Masquerade comes with a fucking reading list. I get that Monte Cook in 1991 was like a homosexual virgin finding out that there are other gays for the first time when visiting the big city, but I don't understand why Monte Cook in 2007 felt that he was qualified to rewrite a signature book of Goth subculture without having done the most cursory of research to find out if the subculture he is marketing to had even existed before he encountered it as a young man. The raw hubris of this is absolutely breathtaking.


Monte Cook: Sith Lord

AncientH:

But, I reasoned, some people aren’t going to want to confine their gaming to a ruined world, so I made it only a “partial apocalypse.” Now while that term seems a bit oxymoronic, it applies to this setting quite nicely. It’s usually easier to juxtapose horror against a more realistic and understandable world, so I knew that at least part of the world should seem normal. Though with heavy emphasis on “seem.”

Monte Cook doesn't understand Gothic punk. Which is not an uncommon thing. People that originally make games do so because they're attracted to the source material - Shadowrun was straight mashup of Tolkien and Gibson, with influenced from Borderlands and Mercedes Lackey - and for lots of people, an RPG might be their first real exposure to concepts like Gothic punk, cyberpunk, Lovecraftian horror, urban fantasy (okay, that one's hard to buy these days), or the like. There's a reason the Crusades Campaign Sourcebook has a bibliography: it's a starting point, not an endpoint. Second- or third-generation developers, who aren't familiar with the "roots" of the game or the genre...tend to miss that. They're pasticheurs, basically: they pick out the big, obvious elements that are easy to mimic, dial it up to 11, and say "Hey, look, it's got tentacles! Must be Lovecraftian, right? I'm brilliant!"

Or, if you're Jason Hardy, you just keep chanting "Cyberpunk Magic Noir" like you know anything about any of those subjects.

So, here's a key difference between McWoD and GURPS:V:tM: the GURPS guys went back to the original books like this was a homework assignment and they wanted all the points; Monte Cook approached this book like a guy doing a book report based on seeing the film-of-the-book.


Probably this one.

FrankT:

Apparently, Monte Cook was given carte blanche to write whatever the fuck he wanted as a stand-alone World of Darkness thingy by Rich Thomas and Stewart Wieck. This rings pretty true, as those guys were watching the company circle the drain and throwing out any ideas no matter how retarded to try to make a quick buck and/or funnel company funds to themselves and/or their friends. I have no idea how much Richard Thomas paid himself to be “creative director” for a stand-alone game line that he apparently let Monte Cook do whatever he wanted with, but I suspect it amounted to “whatever was left in the company treasury.” This book came out within months of White Wolf going officially bankrupt and the IP getting sold to an Icelandic video game company.

Monte Cook talks about how his first ideas were to do World of Darkness in space, or World of Darkness post apocalypse, which actually sound kind of interesting. Instead he made this book, which is supposed to be like post apocalyptic fiction, but scaled way the hell back. Monte admits that “partial apocalypse” is basically oxymoronic, and no further justifications are given.

AncientH:

Following this intro is a series of "Brief Intros" and "Basic Concepts" which are basically the "Boring skip-over boilerplate" sections of RPG books. It's literally the worse parts of book design of D&D and WoD, since it doesn't actually explain anything, and does so in a terrible way that makes the page choppy as hell. This is basically just filler, but they've trained players to expect it. At this point, if a game doesn't treat the reader like an idiot or n00b that's never picked up a die before, it's remarkable.

FrankT:

The “Wat is Roleplaying?” section of any game is a window into what the authors were thinking, into what assumptions they were making and what they thought needed (or did not need) to be said. Monte assures us that if you've played 3rd edition D&D and played a World of Darkness game, that you do not need to read this section at all. That's kind of weird actually, considering how incredibly different those games are from one another in how they expect the relationship between the players and the MC to be. For example, in D&D Mr. Cavern is called the “Dungeon Master,” while in Masquerade Mr. Cavern is called the “Storyteller.” There's a lot of theory of games and theory of storytelling that goes into those choices, and Monte Cook doesn't think it's at all important. Very notably, he refrains from using both terms, and calls Mr. Cavern the “Game Master” like he was still writing for Iron Crown in 1991.

A typical roleplaying game (RPG) session involves you and your buddies sitting around a table, eating pizza, drinking soda, rolling funny-sided dice and making up stories.

That's not entirely inaccurate, but it flippantly disregards the entire “Storyteller” mythology that the Storyteller Games (such as Masquerade) sold themselves with. And remember, this hurling of the auteur theories of RPGs that White Wolf was so fond of into the trash comes one paragraph after telling White Wolf fans to skip a bit because they are already familiar with this material.


Considering the super seriousness of the Vampire community, putting “lol, we're just eating pizza and telling stories” into the book equivalent of spoiler text is simply an odd decision.

When it does pitch for the World of Darkness, it oddly refers to only nWoD books. This is odd because those were extremely unpopular, and even odder considering that Monte Cook obviously hasn't read any of them. It would be like saying “You might remember Spider Man from the One More Day storyline...” And when I say it's obvious that Monte Cook hasn't read the new material, I mean it's super obvious that he hasn't read the new material. He refers to Vampire: the Requiem as running on the “Storyteller System,” which is actually the engine that Masquerade ran on. NWoD ran on the “Storytelling System” which debuted and replaced the Storyteller System in 2003.

AncientH:

The World of Darkness is a setting. It is a modern-day setting keyed for horror games — though of course horror isn’t the only emotion you can elicit when you play games set in the World of Darkness. The World of Darkness is much like the world we see outside our window, but unseen predators lurk in the shadows — predators that prey on the unsuspecting mass of humanity. These creatures range from those which our culture has already described in legends and stories (such as vampires) to those for which we have no name.

The World of Darkness is the most popular setting published by White Wolf, and you might be familiar with the World of Darkness from some of the other games set in it: Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, Mage: The Awakening or perhaps Promethean: The Created or Changeling. The World
of Darkness presented in this book is similar to but not identical to that other World of Darkness.

Any sort of game you want can take place in this World of Darkness, from normal humans confronting ever-more-horrific truths to games where players play vampires and werewolves engaged in a stealthy, shadow war of politics, intrigue and assassination to supernatural creatures waging open battle across the ruins of America’s cities.

I have a feeling that the "post-apocalypse" idea lasted a long time Cook's writing thesis.

Anyway, this isn't exactly wrong but for players of WoD games it might feel off - and the reason is, that all of the different White Wolf WoD games aren't really supposed to be connected. That was in the Old World of Darkness. New World of Darkness actively worked against a uniform setting of any kind, and didn't want crossovers. So it's not just that every single individual game in WoD had different assumptions as to what kind of game you could play, they were also individually incompatible with each other. But that's not enough to stop Monte Cook!

Ironically, the most disturbing aspect of this is the part where Monte tells us to round all fractions down, except "certain rolls, such as damage and hit points, have a minimum of 1." Really? For fuck's sake, Monte.

Third Chapter Zero
More Opening Fic: Faces

FrankT:

Before we get to chapter one, we are regaled with yet another un-numbered chapterlet. This time, it's another piece of micro fiction. It uses less formatting than the first one, and it comes in at three pages. But to underline what I said about the padding of the first story with formatting bullshit, the two stories differ in wordcount by less than two hundred words. The five page story at the beginning is seriously only 10% longer than the three page story preceding chapter 1.

The story is about some monster hunters who fight a werewolf and then one of them gets into a trap laid by some vampires and a big red and scaly D&D-style demon. This POV character is also rather repellant and spends much of the story either posturing or torturing people. The fiction authors appear to believe that to make characters World of Darknessish, they should be unlikeable. Which is not really how you're supposed to write stuff like that. If you're going to make POV characters do bad things, you need to introduce them in a way where the audience is made to sympathize with them first.

AncientH:

Baxter wiped his mouth with his fingers. Fucker. That was dangerous. Now he knows I'm here. Ah well. He's just one guy. I'm too close for him to get away now.

This is one of the floating boxes, containing an excerpt from the text - again, exactly as if this was magazine fiction. I don't know why. I suspect it's because it has the word "Fucker." in the middle of it, which is a word that Monte would not often get to use in d20 products.

FrankT:

Next up: we finally get to Chapter 1!

AncientH:

At random points, I'm going to drop in panels from Preacher. I've been doing a reread recently, and Cassidy is a breath of fresh air.

[silva]

I think you guys should use more varied formats for these reviews. These "trying to be funny" pics are getting tiresome. I for one would prefer some actual game pictures and quotes instead. Just saying.

[TheFlatline]

I agree a WoD-esque post-apocalyptic setting would be interesting. The logistics of the supernaturals might have to change somewhat to support the vastly reduced humanity population levels but still, Fallout meets Vampire (or Werewolf) would be interesting.

[TheFlatline]

I think you guys should use more varied formats for these reviews. These "trying to be funny" pics are getting tiresome. I for one would prefer some actual game pictures and quotes instead. Just saying.

Wouldn't that be like copyright infringement? I know you have no problem with that after the Dishonored ripoff thread but... yeah.

[silva]

Hmmm, makes sense. Though all games at this point have previews on drivethrough/indiepressrevolution/etc, right ?

[Whipstitch]

While this was before the vampire and goth subcultures really existed, among some of my friends, I was known as the “vampire guy.”

OK, he's talking about 1991.

My cursory google image search didn't yield a goth slowbro. Internet, I am disappoint. Anyway, yeah, either Monte Cook is way lazy or else he was running the "I'm not goth (which means I am very goth)" gambit. I lean towards the former.

[karpik777]

Hmmm, makes sense. Though all games at this point have previews on drivethrough/indiepressrevolution/etc, right ?

What does that change?

My cursory google image search didn't yield a goth slowbro. Internet, I am disappoint.

[silva]

I imagine the preview images are allowed to be used, no ?

[Whipstitch]

My cursory google image search didn't yield a goth slowbro. Internet, I am disappoint.

You can't be goth without a hairstyle that confuses my grandma. No exceptions.

[Leress]

Wouldn't that be like copyright infringement? I know you have no problem with that after the Dishonored ripoff thread but... yeah.

It wouldn't be since it is for the purposes for review pretty much fair use but since some of pictures are from the product so that is just silly thing to say

I think you guys should use more varied formats for these reviews. These "trying to be funny" pics are getting tiresome. I for one would prefer some actual game pictures and quotes instead. Just saying.

[silva]

Lol

[JigokuBosatsu]

There aren't enough pictures of bears in the WW books for them to give you what you want, Silva.

[karpik777]

I imagine the preview images are allowed to be used, no ?

How many previews will have enough art to fill a single post in an OSSR? Also, if someone is interested in the art, they can go and check that themselves - the quality of rules/fluff should matter, not pretty pictures in books (though judging by the success of Pathfinder, many people care only about the art).

[RelentlessImp]

I remember hearing about this but never looking into it for the exact reason Frank stated: even to a neophyte WoD player like me it sounded like it was nothing more than a naked cash grab by people who didn't give a shit. Glad to know I was right.

[silva]

I imagine the preview images are allowed to be used, no ?

How many previews will have enough art to fill a single post in an OSSR? Also, if someone is interested in the art, they can go and check that themselves - the quality of rules/fluff should matter, not pretty pictures in books (though judging by the success of Pathfinder, many people care only about the art).

Nah, good point. Don't wanna continue fucking up with the review so move on.

[Fucks]

Why all the rage against scribendi.com? I mean, it's actual editors who are working there. What's so band about a gaming comapny to outsource the editor's work?

[Username17]

Why all the rage against scribendi.com? I mean, it's actual editors who are working there. What's so band about a gaming comapny to outsource the editor's work?

Well for starters they are outsourcing their work to non-gamers, which would be exactly like people producing any other kind of technical document outsourcing their editing to people with no knowledge of the subject matter. Any editor with even a passing familiarity with the World of Darkness would have noticed the Storyteller vs. Storytelling System thing, but a group of Canadian online mercenaries totally missed that.

In the next chapter it becomes glaringly obvious that the "editors" weren't just incapable of finding contextual errors based on the history of the World of Darkness, but at least weren't interested in finding contextual errors within the document. Spoiler: it involves areas and distances.

100% of the editing was some anonymous Canadian with no backround in any relevant subject hunting through an early draft for spelling mistakes. That's all the editing this book ever got. And the basic unsatisfactoriness of this is extremely noticeable in every single book they did it for all the way back to Ordo Dracul in 2005 (assuming that's the first one, because honestly I can't be fucked to check every last White Wolf book from the early 21st century).

[TheFlatline]

Wouldn't that be like copyright infringement? I know you have no problem with that after the Dishonored ripoff thread but... yeah.

It wouldn't be since it is for the purposes for review pretty much fair use but since some of pictures are from the product so that is just silly thing to say

I asked a question. The answer is no. I wasn't making a statement.

[Shrapnel]

Um... just a small request. Could you possibly spoiler the image you used for Richard Thomas? It's... disturbing.

[Leress]

Wouldn't that be like copyright infringement? I know you have no problem with that after the Dishonored ripoff thread but... yeah.

It wouldn't be since it is for the purposes for review pretty much fair use but since some of pictures are from the product so that is just silly thing to say

I asked a question. The answer is no. I wasn't making a statement.

I didn't mean to have it sound as harsh as it looks.

[Prak]

Why all the rage against scribendi.com? I mean, it's actual editors who are working there. What's so band about a gaming comapny to outsource the editor's work?

Well for starters they are outsourcing their work to non-gamers, which would be exactly like people producing any other kind of technical document outsourcing their editing to people with no knowledge of the subject matter. Any editor with even a passing familiarity with the World of Darkness would have noticed the Storyteller vs. Storytelling System thing, but a group of Canadian online mercenaries totally missed that.

You need more than a passing familiarity with WoD. You at least need to have read about OWoD and NWoD, and more than just flipping through a couple books. I didn't know prior to this thread that WW had changed the tense of it's system name between them and the longest continuous game I've played was WoD.

Um... just a small request. Could you possibly spoiler the image you used for Richard Thomas? It's... disturbing.

And maybe double check that images actually load? There are several missing images.

Also. Do these gaming flash fiction freelance gigs still exist? How do I find those if they do?

[Username17]

Also. Do these gaming flash fiction freelance gigs still exist? How do I find those if they do?

Sort of?

You don't generally get the gig "write flash fiction," the authors of a game book will generally have flash fiction duties as well as whatever rules/fluff they are expected to put out. Prose is much easier to write than mechanics, but most pay-by-the-word contracts pay the same. So if you were trying to make a living writing this stuff, you'd naturally want to write more of this and less of the other stuff.

And sometimes this gets really decadent. Without solid developers with clear visions you get horseshit like Scion, which opens with a 23 thousand word novella, or SR5 which has thirty pages of bullshit fiction pieces.

But the authors of these pieces are still going to be people who were already working on the book in some capacity.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Monte Cook's World of Darkness
Chapter One: A World in Darkness


...and I'm all out of bubblegum.

AncientH:

We have mentioned before that Monte Cook had this idea of McWoD as happening "after the Apocalypse," and then turned it down to "Sortof the Apocalypse." This chapter, which is supposed to introduce the readers to his version of the World of Darkness, is pretty explicitly that. I think he's wearing his influences pretty clearly on his sleeve here. Monte Cook doesn't understand Gothic Punk, and I'd seriously wonder if he was at all conversant with the new edition of World of Darkness. This is the kind of setup that happens when somebody is doing a long-term storage callback to the old days of Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse, and remembering how the whole oWoD setting was explicitly set in "The Final Nights," which is sort of like the Gathering from Highlander.


Look, all I'm saying is that if the Apocalypse DID occur during the 1990s, nobody would have noticed, nobody would have cared, and nobody would want to remember what they were wearing.

I don't think it's even appropriate to say that Monte Cook's vision shits on the hearts of fanboys; his basic vision for why McWoD is the way it is is just fundamentally incompatible with the setting of nWoD or oWoD. You could totally use GURPS:V:tM to play a Vampire campaign with regular VtM books; the settings are close enough to identical, even if the mechanics are different, they're not that different that you can't mindcaulk over the cracks. But Monte Cook wants to shoot down even the possibility of that as soon as fucking possible.

FrankT:

The first chapter is 37 pages long, and tries to sell us this thematically dissonant package of half-baked ideas. The basic idea is that when horrors from beyond reality attacked, rather than do anything particularly interesting, they replaced a 300 square mile area around Monte Cook's home town of Watertown, South Dakota with a swirling nightmare hellscape. This is considered the greatest holocaust of human history, despite being roughly a twelfth the number of people in the actual holocaust (although I am at a loss as to how the body count is supposed to be even that high, 300 square miles is about one third of one percent of the land area of South Dakota). Like, Monte Cook is seriously just taking the piss and running with my solipsism metaphor way too far. The greatest tragedy that ever befell the world of man is... the destruction of Monte Cook's home town and 8 miles in every direction. Seriously? That is what we're going with?

The monsters meanwhile, have been edited into reality with the big explosion that turned South Dakota into an unpopulated desert [insert snark here]. They are hidden from the sight of normal people and also there are special people whose belief in reality keeps the nightmare world from transforming the whole world. I guess there weren't enough of these special dreamer people in South Dakota, and psycho-analyzing Monte Cook is just too fucking easy at this point.

The villainous monsters are called the Iconnu, which is almost an oWoD term (Inconnu), a super special high-level group of vampires whose storyline never went anywhere. So that's the kind of shoutout you might do if you still had the 1991 copy of Masquerade with the rose on the cover and had no clue or give a shit what plots and groups the kids were talking about 16 years later. And they are doing a reality war thing not unlike Feng Shui, where they have specific arbitrary targets they need to take out in order to change reality. Then the villains sent evil spirits to possess people and turn them into vampires and werewolves and shit. And some of these possessed monsters fight for the reality destroying bad guys and others don't. Seemingly, you're supposed to play the ones that have had heroic conversions.

Though supernatural beings now exist in the world, they have not had a long, secret history of interaction with humanity. They showed up a year ago.

And you know what? This setup is terrible. Everything about it is terrible. There's no room for ancient monster societies or monster societies at all. Whichever side you're on has like literally zero backstory. It did not even exist before the Nightmare Wave. The entire plotline has been replaced with the plotline to Mortal Kombat 3. Only even Mortal Kombat 3 had more backstory. There's a big swirling maelstrom in the sky and no you have to fight a bunch of dudes with super powers who work for a soul stealing fucker, but that's it. The main villains are alien and unknowable and you never get to see them, which means that they are in
essence entirely flavorless.


Oh no! The President has transformed into Baraka Obama for no reason!

Basically, someone thought that the problem with nWoD is that it had too much metaplot. I have no words. Bizarrely, this chapter continues on for over thirty more pages, despite having already told us that there's nothing to know or care about in the backstory at all.

AncientH:

So the Haunted Lands are bad, but not real bad. At least people live there. (People and other things that are much, much worse.) You pass through about 250 miles of Haunted Lands. Once you get within 250 miles of the Intrusion Point, you officially enter the Annihilation Zone

The whole fucking chapter is like this. It's kinda painful. There's no attempt to establish atmosphere or voice, it's pure exposition, aimed directly at the reader. It's really kinda old school, the kinda shit you'd see in a bad GammaWorld supplement or something, except even GW never tried to cram three two-word Proper Nouns! into two sentences, at least not that I can remember. Also, you know what would be awesome with all this shitty geography? A map.

I kinda suspect that at this point, Monte Cook is doing this deliberately to avoid having to deal with anything created in any other version of WoD. But that exactly undermines the point of the fucking game, Monte! If you can't use McWoD to play a Werewolf Monk, then what the fuck is the point? You might as well write your own Tome hack based off fucking Urban Arcana.


To the individual that completes the Farcast review, I will write a full game and setting involving any three keywords of your choosing. This is a limited-time offer.

FrankT:

We are told that there is a 500 mile area around Watertown, South Dakota where there are heightened levels of monsters. We are also told that Chicago (520 miles) and Denver (537 miles) are inside that radius, which they just barely are not. Sloppy and weird, weird and sloppy. It gets worse, because the “300 miles” thing is talked about as square miles, radius miles, and diameter miles interchangeably in this document. I would point out that the largest of those (radius) is nine hundred and forty three times larger than the smallest (square miles). This book has 380 pages to tell us one thing about the setting, which is how much of it has been swallowed by the crawling chaos. And it fails at that so spectacularly that it defies ready analysis.


You don't get to write for White Wolf if you remember getting a passing grade in geometry.

Also, all the descriptions of the intrusion point and the nightmare wave and shit are in-character, with an in-world guy telling you that most people have the ways and hows of the whole End of Evangelion deal wrong, but also that the truth is literally unknowable. So this is all just sort of wasted space as near as I can tell.


Then shit got flooby, and... you know... whatever...

AncientH:

In keeping with at least one White Wolf tradition, Monte Cook refuses to commit himself to anything in the way of specifics in this chapter, and often veers towards the most-shitty option. For example, the Iconnu are pretty explicitly Lovecraftian entities from beyond time and space. But there is nary a mention of Lovecraft here, or even Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand! Nope, we're going to go for something that the Southern Baptist contingent can comfortably accept:

Hell?
To some, the Intrusion Point seems like a portal to Hell. Some even call it “the Hellchasm,” which is clever slang but bears little relation to the reality (or unreality, as the case may be). The Intrusion Point is not a “portal,” and does not lead to “Hell.” It’s more like a footprint, or maybe a scar. It is the result of something truly OTHER touching our world. Thus, I call it “the Intrusion Point.”

I can understand where these other, misguided people get their ideas, though. The reality of the Iconnu, the reality beyond ours, is so completely alien that it seems like Hell. So does the portion of our reality that has touched theirs (the Conflagration). There’s fire and brimstone (and just about anything else you can imagine). The collision of realities alters people and animals and creates demonic, hellish creatures that one can easily believe crawled from the Netherworld.

In addition, the Iconnu, somehow, tap into the wellspring of dead spirits connected with our world — evil spirits. The Iconnu also draw upon other spirits — spirits bestial, inhuman, and vicious. This ability enhances the feeling that the Iconnu come from Hell in the Judeo-Christian sense, so I can’t really blame anyone for making that mistake.

This is bad setting design. Look, I never thought I would say this, but consider RIFTS. In both cases we're looking at interdimensional whatsits interacting with the world and causing chaos and mayhem and allowing hostile entities access to our world, yadda yadda, but at least RIFTS gives them names, identities, stats, goals, and personalities! Now, they might be insane, like Rifts: Vampire Kingdoms, but there is at least some nominal amount of worldbuilding that you can work with as far as determining the number, identity, motives, capabilities, and weaknesses of your various characters. Nameless assholes and chaotic hellholes located in Middle America are the kind of thing you see in film school dropout arthaus movies, where some bright young thing on mescaline gets a holy vision to film a man meditating on his own navel only to zoom in and find out it's actually his anus.


If you stare at it long enough, the eye blinks.

FrankT:

The Nightmare Wave makes weird, disturbing shit happen for no reason. It's like the Awakening in Shadowrun, except that it's all nightmarish and there's no rhyme or reason for it at all. This is an extremely bad fit for a d20 hack. The d20 system is all about codified effects, it's all high magic shit. But these are all top-of-the-MC's-head type low magic effects. It's a poor fit mechanically. It also doesn't really fit well with the sort of obsessive classification of the night terrors that made the World of Darkness fun to talk about.



Once you make the leap from a lot of possibilities to infinite possibilities, then there's nothing to talk about. Every nightmare event is just a Steve event. Every nightmare beast is just a Steve beast. It's all Steve, and it's totally disengaging. The excited babble of “basically anything can happen in the nightmare zone” is so pointless and disempowering that the rest of the book might as well not exist.

AncientH:

It's basically Wild Magic from the Forgotten Realms setting without the handy random table. But to expand on what Frank said, one of the inherent difficulties in any creative endeavor - which includes game design and gamemastering - is the blank sheet of paper. When you have an infinite number of possibilities, it's really hard to get started. That's why game settings and mechanics narrow the possibilities down, establishing a structure for stories and characters to take place in, establishing limitations on what characters can plausibly do, how the world is organized, etc. Even in games like GURPS, which are ambitiously universal, the idea is to establish enough rules to realize any setting or character; there are huge lists of named skills with math problems attached to them. Cast that against Unknown Armies, where it's like Calvinball except you're on Double Secret Probation.

FrankT:

Where the book really takes a step off the TL;DR cliff is in its descriptions of the categories of magic dudes. Vampires and Werewolves are both humans whose bodies have been taken over by evil ghosts, making them essentially interchangeable and also not particularly compelling as protagonists. There's no tragic gothic horror going on here, they are just shit heads.


Not a good start for a player character splat.

There is a half-assed attempt to use the nWoD five-point plan as categories of Vampire and shit, but remember that all of these dudes are a year old or less and there's no fucking point in any of them being a Mekhet or a Daeva. There's no tradition at all, so who gives a rat's ass what faction you're in? To make it worse, all the five sub-splats are on Team Evil For No Reason, so there's even less purpose behind it. As a PC vampire, you are one of the “Broken,” vampires for whom the host is in control and the evil ghost is not. Making all the rants just wasted space. If you're a PC werewolf, you're one of the “Calm,” which is just the same thing as a Broken Vampire but with Werewolf sauce. The description of these splats (not the powers and abilities, that's for another chapter, the description) goes on for five pages for Mages, Vampires, and Werewolves, and three pages and change for Demons and Awakened. And those are your splats. Mages and Awakened are humans with powers “for no reason,” Vampires and Werewolves are humans whose bodies have been possessed by evil spirits, and Demons are just plain evil spirits with no body.

The book seriously takes 22 pages to get that across. It's not well done.

AncientH:

Remember how GURPS:V:tM managed to manfully squeeze a 200+ page V:tM main book into <100 pages GURPS book? Yeah, this is Monte Cook trying manfully to squeeze a 200+ page nWoD book into 200+ page d20 book. I'm surprised this literally wasn't a four-hundred page shelfbreaker, it is the worse of both worlds in that it is aping the most terrible formatting practices of nWoD with the most terrible formatting processes of d20.

No game mechanics exist for this spiritual battle; it is primarily a roleplaying tool.

You get this a lot in this book. It's not that d20 doesn't have conceptual room to handle a conflict of souls - it's seriously probably just a Will save. The fact that McWoD doesn't want to actually commit to this is just bizarre, unless Monte was determined to write as few mechanics as possible and leave it all up to SKR.

FrankT:

The biggest conceptual problem is the Mages I think. Magic started working one year ago, so I don't understand where anyone is getting any true ancient knowledge. Shadowrun solved that issue with mentor spirits and also magic having come back on the scene 39 years ago so you could very easily have magic passed down to your by your great-grandmother. But this “blink and you'll miss it” sudden magicking up of the world leaves the whole idea of “knowledgeable magic users” out in the cold. Where the fuck are they getting their information?

AncientH:

Those who practice these mystic arts usually have knowledge of the Unbidden. We know something of the truth behind the Intrusion and, thus, from where our magic comes. We know about the Unbidden, though obviously not too much, as they are beings that cannot truly be known. What we do with our knowledge, though, varies. Mages feel one of several ways about the Unbidden.

Despite this supposed knowledge, Monte isn't telling us shit.

It's hard to really emphasize how absolutely silly and ricockulous the whole premise is. Monte's pulled the rug out from under the World of Darkness - it's not secret, there is no supernatural underground, no secret history worth mentioning, and the Apocalypse has sort of already happened. It's Hellgate: Bumfuck, South Dakota.

Anyway, the other flavors are Demons and the Awakened. Demons are like the vampires and werewolves, these are just another Soul Fusion option. The Awakened are somewhere between Hunters and Sorcerers, in that they're normal humans with the abnormal power of...uh...seeing supernatural shit...and usually try to hit it until it stops moving.

Cross&#8722;Pollination
You might be wondering the same thing I am: is it possible to belong to two Shadow Cultures? Can a werewolf study magic and become a mage? Can a recently arriving soul possess an Awakened, turning him into an Awakened vampire?

I don’t have the answer, but I don’t think these things are possible. I haven’t seen it, anyway, and I’ve seen a lot in the year I’ve been doing this. Belonging to one Shadow Culture seems to exclude you from the others, though why, I don’t know. It’s too bad. I was thinking about learning magic. I could be wrong, though. One thing I’ve learned in the last year: now, just about anything is possible.

Don't worry! Monte & co. will step on this brief moment of hope on almost the very next page.

This picture is worth every word on this page, and thensome.

Chapter Two: Character


Never gonna happen.

FrankT:

The Character chapter is 27 pages long and includes most of the basic 3.5 D&D rules about what attributes and levels means. Yes, this is a class and levels game, and you may not multiclass.


She knows it's a multipass.

The usual disclaimers about how Strength and Constitution are pretty sketchy inclusions as main stats in LotR fanfic and are a downright terrible fit for a game in which characters have cars and guns apply. While classes can't be combined in any way, you do pick two half-classes from different lists. One of them determines which base numbers and magic powers you get as you level up, and the other gives you your skill list and a bonus to a stat at first level. Obviously, the first is way more important than the second, and several of the class combinations are much better than others. For example, if you're a Demon you probably are a “Tempter” subclass and have the “Spirit” focus. You could do other things, but that would be shitty.

AncientH:

While the serial numbers are largely filed off, the skeleton of this game isn't d20 - it's d20 Modern. You can tell because it uses a Defense rating (Def) instead of AC, and the little gun-symbols next to the Base Attack Bonus.

The first half of your class is the Character Type (Awakened, Demon, Mage, Vampire, Werewolf), and the second half is your Character Focus (Might, Intellect, Spirit, Stealth). This is...suboptimal. I know I keep harping on GURPS:V:tM, but in that book the explicit purpose was to make everything GURPS-compatible. You could take a GURPS Brujah and drop them in a GURPS Fantasy Viking Hellboy mashup and everybody would be on the same ruleset. Here, McWoD is explicitly pissing away any system goodwill it might have by deliberately avoiding using any established classes, or even the potential to use classes. What was so fucking hard about describing each of the five types with Player Character race mechanics, Monte? Were you actually that afraid of a Giovanni Dread Necromancer?

I would like to remind everyone that at this point, 56 pages in, McWoD has officially squandered both the setting and the system benefits of its progenitors. We really don't have much to look forward to at this point: you can't use this to play your nWoD game because the mechanics and the setting don't match, and you can't really use this with any other d20 product either. It's as close to incompatible as you can get. We're down to scrounging through the remains for ideas for other, better games or maybe a useful feat that you can snag for your d20 Modern character if you give Mister Cavern sufficient oral sex.

FrankT:

The five main classes were written by different people and have no unifying theme as to design theory. The Vampire Type has empty levels and the Mage type gets a giant and every expanding “components” pool that we will get to later every time they go up in level. Mages are “completely batshit insane” and written by SKR so there you go. Spells are built out of pieces and you get literally dozens of these lego pieces even at first level. If that sounds completely broken to you, you're damn right it is. But for the moment we'll leave it for chapter five when all the madness is actually “explained.”

The other four types are kind of obviously unbalanced. Awakened get extra skill points and feats (making them like Fighters and Experts at the same time), while Vampires get “Discipline” most levels. There's no rhyme or reason I can see as to why some of their levels are empty, it's just a “go fuck yourself” moment. While none of these powers or abilities are actually defined in this chapter, it's pretty obvious that Mages are the winners and Werewolves are the losers. So that's pretty true to the nWoD source material. Like in nWoD, a Werewolf’s hybrid form has a duration measured in seconds, and like a D&D Barbarian turning into a clawed monster just adds +4 to your Strength on the d20 Modern scale of who gives a shit, why am I not using firearms?


The tale of Werewolves is a tale of woe.

AncientH:

For reasons I don't understand, the BAB for Awakened, Demons, and Vampires starts at +3 at 1st level, +4 for Werewolves, +2 for Mages. I don't know why; keep in mind that in normal d20 games the BAB is +0 or +1 at 1st level. Yes, even though they don't even appear in this game, Fighters are still small in the pants.

As for the Types classes...uh, they're 20-level base classes where you basically start out with all the essential powers and weaknesses of your monster-type, and as you grow up you gain incremental improvements that you pick from a list discussed in some other, later chapter. So even though they say things like "Mage" and "Demon," mechanically most of these are equivalent to a bunch of Fighter classes where you gain a new feat every other level. There is less thought put into these classes than the ones for Conan d20.

FrankT:

There's not a lot to say about these character classes because all of them feature powers of one flavor or another front and center and there's no explanation of what those powers do. Obviously missing from this list is “non-magical humans” which are supposed to be most of the people in the world that you interact with. That's... not made up for later in the book. There are literally no rules for statting up NPCs at all in this whole book. That sounds like me exaggerating or something, but it's really like that. There are a couple of named NPCs who are humans, but the rules for building one don't exist. It's... troubling.

AncientH:

There are some holdovers from WoD. Vampires have vitae, for example, and need to feed and can blood bond people and regenerate. Werewolves have rites and regeneration sprint healing and are vulnerable to silver. Everybody except the Awakened has some sort of pool for powering their own brand of mojo. If somebody told me it was pretty much identical to the Ki Pool for monks in Pathfinder, I would not be surprised.

Next chapter: Skillz!

[Maxus]

Allright, Ancient History, I'll give the Farcast Review a shot. I see it was left off on 140

[DrPraetor]

You might as well write your own Tome hack based off fucking Urban Arcana.

To the individual that completes the Farcast review, I will write a full game and setting involving any three keywords of your choosing. This is a limited-time offer.

Does Farcast relate to Urban Arcana somehow?

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55023
of this?
http://www.farcastblog.com/p/blog-page.html

How soon do you need this?

I was going to finally get-going on my share of the Bubblegum Crisis review, also I should be doing this science crap. OTOH, the soon-to-be-dominant RPG genre of "Paranoid Rococo Moombahton" isn't going to write itself. I picked those words mostly at random, but this could totally work, sort of a mashup of Rah Xephon and Love & Rockets.